William Z. Foster (born William Edward Foster; February 25, 1881 – September 1, 1961) was a radical American labor organizer and Communist politician, whose career included serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1945 to 1957. He was previously a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, leading the drive to organize packinghouse industry workers during World War I and the steel strike of 1919.
Early life
He was born William Edward Foster in Taunton, Massachusetts, on February 24, 1881, the son of a Fenian, James Foster, who had fled County Carlow after the failure of the revolutionary Fenian Rising in Ireland and the waves of arrests that drove hundreds of others out of the country. His mother, Elizabeth McLoughlin, was an English Catholic textile worker. His mother had nine surviving children of 23 babies she bore.
His family moved to the Irish area of Skittereen within the Moyamensing neighborhood of South Philadelphia, where his father worked as a stableman and was part of a group of Irish-American Fenians. Foster left school at the age of ten to apprentice himself to a dye sinker. Foster left that position three years later to work at a type foundry and then in a white lead factory. Over the next ten years he worked in fertilizer plants in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Jacksonville, Florida; as a railroad construction worker and lumberman in Florida; as a streetcar motorman in New York City; as a lumberman and longshoreman in Portland, Oregon; and as a sailor. He also homesteaded in Oregon from 1904 to 1907, working various odd jobs as a miner, sheepherder, sawmill worker, and railroad employee during that time.
Political career Foster joined the Socialist Party of America in 1901 and was a member of its Oregon affiliate and later its Washington state affiliate. He left the party in the midst of a faction fight in 1909. He then joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), taking part in one of its free speech fights in Spokane, Washington.
Foster became a prominent figure in the IWW. He served as its representative at an international labor conference in Budapest in 1911 and contributed to its papers. His politics, however, were moving him away from the IWW. He became a committed syndicalist after touring Europe in 1910 and 1911, and he criticized the IWW for not working within established unions. He urged American leftists to join the relatively conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions to take control of them—a strategy called "boring from within"—instead of trying to establish rival unions, as the IWW had tried to do. Foster failed to convince the IWW to adopt this position, however, and he eventually left it and formed his own organization, the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA).
In Foster's 1912 pamphlet Syndicalism, he argues for direct action at the shop floor level, which he believed would lead to workers governing society through "shop organizations". Foster biographer James R. Barnett argues that this pamphlet shows the influence of anarchist thought, and several members of the newly-founded SLNA—including Jay Fox and Esther Abramowitz, Foster's future wife—were anarchists. Other members of the SLNA included Earl Browder, an accountant and union activist from Kansas City who Foster met in 1913; James P. Cannon, an IWW member; and Tom Mooney, a left-wing socialist activist. By 1914, however, the SLNA had broken up. Foster stated that it "crumbled away into disconnected groups of militants working here and there in the trade union movement", whereas Fox said that they had simply "decided to lay off for a while".
After the disintegration of the SLNA, Foster became vice president of the AFL-affiliated International Union of Shingle Weavers, Sawmill Workers and Woodsmen. After his appointment expired, he moved to Chicago in 1915, becoming an inspector for Swift & Company at the Union Stock Yards. That year, he was appointed as a general organizer for the AFL and founded the International Trade Union Educational League (ITUEL). He outlined his labor philosophy in his 1915 pamphlet Trade Unionism: The Road to Freedom, arguing that radicals did not need to advocate for revolution in unions because organizing workers was an inherently radical act, even if it meant compromising with conservative union leaders.
The following year, in 1916, he became a union business agent for a Chicago local of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America. Through the ITUEL, he insinuated himself into the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), a trade union federation headed by John Fitzpatrick. He also advocated for a number of major labor-related causes, including a campaign to free Mooney, who gained support from labor activists when he was imprisoned for allegedly throwing a bomb at a Preparedness Day parade in 1916. Unlike Eugene V. Debs, Morris Hillquit, Victor Berger, and some other socialists, he did not publicly oppose the United States's entry into World War I. He helped sell war bonds in 1918, as did many other labor advocates, including Mother Jones. However, Foster biographer Edward P. Johanningsmeier speculates that he married Abramowitz in 1918 to avoid conscription.
Organizing packinghouse workers
In 1917, Foster and the CFL turned their attention to Chicago's meat-packing industry. Unions had tried to organize the packinghouses for decades before World War I. The Knights of Labor led organizing drives among these workers in the early 1880s, and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen made gains among the industry's many diverse ethnic groups in the first decade of the 20th century. By 1904, however, union activity in the packinghouses of the Union Stock Yards had declined.
With America's entry into the World War I, the demand for meat increased tremendously while conscription and the near standstill of immigration from Europe led to labor shortages that improved workers' collective bargaining power. In addition, the federal government had an interest in maintaining production unimpeded and avoiding the disruption that a packinghouse workers' strike would entail. Before the CFL could organize these workers, it had to resolve the competing claims of the various unions that represented different segments of the industry.
Due to their ethnic and racial diversity and the high percentage of unskilled workers among them, Foster believed that organizing stockyards workers on an industrial rather than craft basis was crucial. Instead of founding a new organization to do this, Foster and the CFL planned to create a Stockyards Labor Council (SLC). Like the recently formed railroad federations, the SLC would unite all interested unions into a single body with the ability to organize the industry as a whole. Foster obtained the endorsement of his union, the Railway Carmen, for this plan, and then took the proposal to Local 87 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, who supported it. He obtained the CFL's approval on July 15, 1917.
The SLC was formed a week later with representatives from many crafts, including machinists, electricians, carpenters, coopers, office workers, steamfitters, engineers, railway carmen, and firemen. While this body lacked the authority to negotiate grievances or propose wage scales for all the workers in the industry, it operated under a single, united executive board and employed a single, unified group of business agents and organizers. This "infused [the] whole movement with the spirit of industrial unionism" according to Foster, who was elected secretary of the council.
Another factor posed a serious obstacle to organizing packinghouse workers. As part of the Great Migration, thousands of Black Americans from the Southern United States migrated to Chicago, with many going to work in the packinghouses. Tensions were high between Black and white workers. Many of the unions in the SLC excluded Black Americans from membership, either overtly or covertly, and Black workers were wary of these unions. Meanwhile, white workers viewed Black workers as potential strikebreakers after many were employed as such during a 1904 strike. As a compromise, to give Black workers an alternative to discriminatory craft unions, the SLC offered membership in segregated, majority-Black, AFL-affiliated locals. Many Black workers were unsatisfied with this compromise, ultimately dropping out of these segregated locals. The same pattern of division prevailed among immigrant workers, who were organized along linguistic and ethnic lines.
Under these conditions, with the support of more militant union officials and rank-and-file workers, Foster pushed the unions toward a strike, arguing that conditions were ideal. While he faced opposition from more conservative union officials, he secured the votes for a strike in the fall of 1917. Fearing the effects of an impending strike, and with workers pushing the federal government to seize the packinghouses, the Wilson administration pressured the employers to agree to arbitration about wages and hours. The arbitration board, led by Judge Samuel Alschuler, ordered the companies to institute the eight-hour day, overtime pay, and paid lunches and holidays. Workers also received significant wage increases. This empowered the unions, and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters' membership doubled in the following months.
These gains proved short-lived. Real wages began to decline, and further arbitration from Alschuler in 1919 yielded only small wage increases, denying workers' demands for double-time overtime pay, a forty-hour workweek, and the abolition of piece rates at railroad car shops. Then, in July 1919, the drowning of a Black boy on the lakefront ignited a "race riot", with much of the violence taking place near the packinghouses. The SLC called on white unionists to protect their Black counterparts, but after arsonists attacked a Lithuanian neighborhood, rumors spread that the vengeful Black people were responsible. Tensions reached a boiling point. While the union was able to avert outright violence between workers, locals began to defect. Soon after the riots, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters tried to establish a competing labor council, District Council 9, breaking off relations with the SLC. A third council, the Mechanical Trades Council, also formed. By 1920, the SLC had collapsed. As soon as the arbitration agreement expired, employers cut wages, and after several failed strikes by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, many workers switched to company unions.
The Steel Strike of 1919
While the packinghouse campaign was still underway, Foster turned his attention to another project: organizing steel workers. The problems here were even more complex. In addition to a history of failed strikes and deep ethnic divisions within the workforce, the steel mills were divided by skill level. The higher-paid, native-born skilled workers frequently looked down on their immigrant coworkers, who were often considered unskilled or semiskilled.
Foster proposed a similar strategy to his previous campaign but on a much larger scale: a mass union drive led by a federation of existing unions in every major steel production center. The goal would be to recruit enough workers that executives would be forced to negotiate. Fitzpatrick supported the project, and Foster presented the plan at the AFL's 1918 convention, which he attended as a representative of the Railway Carmen. The AFL's reception was tepid. It endorsed a special conference to create a committee to organize steel workers—the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers—but each constituent union contributed only US$100 to the committee's upkeep, leaving the committee with much less than the $250,000 Foster estimated it needed. However, some unions did contribute organizers.